Tony

  Please note: The screening of Tony on Sunday, September 20 at 12:30 pm will be presented with on-screen captions. One of the many charms of Tony, the splendid fifth feature from the Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, is that the film would be just as pleasurable if its subject were a complete unknown. In other words, this fictionalized origin tale of Anthony Bourdain, the celebrated chef, writer, raconteur and television host who died in 2018, asks no more of its audience than any other movie about a mouthy teenager on the rocky road to adulthood. Informed by the early chapters of Bourdain's 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Johnson introduces his lanky, 19-year-old hero during one transformative summer in 1975. After failing to win a writing fellowship he had assumed was in the bag, Tony (The Holdovers' Dominic Sessa, fantastic) spontaneously follows his crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones), to Provincetown, Mass. He will land outside a seafood restaurant and at the feet of someone who will teach him much more than how to cook. That restaurant, barely a half step up from a fast-food joint, is the raucous heart of Tony, its kitchen -- like the clamorous workplace in Johnson's 2023 gem, BlackBerry -- a hive of controlled chaos and the crucible in which Tony will be tested. The restaurant's owner, known only as Chef (Antonio Banderas), is a rigorous yet kindhearted overseer who recognizes something potent behind Tony's arrogant posturing, offering him a hammock on his porch in exchange for washing dishes. But if Chef is the angel on Tony's shoulder, the devil on the other is Sal (a brilliant Leo Woodall), a skirt-chasing, line-snorting hedonist and a freewheeling guide to the town's nightlife and mood-altering substances. This tension, more than any romance, drives the film's drama, the screenplay repeatedly raising the choice between discipline and recklessness. --Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times Critic's Pick https://youtu.be/k1MVnzd2aVc